Invention: Heart-reinforcing corset

时间：2019-03-01 10:18:01166网络整理admin

By Justin Mullins Congestive heart failure happens when the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s metabolic needs. The condition is poorly understood, but generally thought to be caused by problems with the heart’s valves or damage to its walls. In the short term, the heart tries to compensate by expanding so that it can pump more blood. But this starts a vicious cycle of decline that damages the overstretched heart even more. A protective band around the heart to reinforce its walls and prevent it from becoming enlarged could be the answer, say Bilal Shafi and colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, US. They suggest building up the walls with two layers of polymer. The first is made of polyethylene glycol to provide strength, and the second is a layer of collagen that provides elasticity and biocompatibility. The key to the technique is the ability to deliver the polymer mix to the heart in the form of a powder or gel. It can then be cured in place by UV light or heat to form a thin, strong film. Read the full heart-wall reinforcement patent application. About 140,000 people each year in the US alone suffer damage to the nerve that controls blinking on one side of the face or the other. About 15% of these never recover the ability to blink, which is crucial for lubricating and cleaning the eye. Many suffer permanent eye damage as a result. The traditional treatments for this problem are crude: implanting gold weights into the upper eyelid to help it close, connecting the eyelids to other nerves in the face, or even sewing the eyelids together in extreme cases. But Doreen Jacob and colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, have devised a pair of glasses that communicates with sensors attached to the eyelids’ muscles. The sensors report whether the muscles controlling the eyelid have contracted or not. If they haven’t for a certain time, the glasses send a command to force a blink by stimulating the muscles electrically. The team says that the device can prevent eye damage by ensuring that the build up of dirt and bacteria is prevented by regular blinking. Read the full automatic blink patent application. Once a bomb has been primed, an accidental shock can cause it to explode. The US Army would like charges that can tell the difference between accidental impacts and intended ones, so it tasked Jahangir Rastegar and colleagues at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, US, with designing them. The team has proposed a system which it says could work for explosive devices that are launched before detonating, such as rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. The idea is to have the mortar “know” it has been launched, and that on the next impact it should explode. A piezoelectric sensor in the shell turns the vibration from a shock into an electric signal. If that signal is characteristic of the launch charge, the fuse becomes primed so the next impact triggers detonation. If the shock is purely accidental, the signal will have a different signature, and the fuse ignores it. Read the full piezoelectric fuse patent application. Brain radiator, Bio-briefcase, Truck-bomb trap, Hydrofoil wakeboard, Green technology special, The hibernation diet, Strategy predicting software, Blood-staunching batteries,